Poet, Author, Waitress

Tag: night

I wake alone in foggy lands,
untouched anew by lonely hands,
and whisper into earless nights
the secrets of my fitful geist–

(and speaking now with wand’ring tongues
from unfamiliar depths have sprung
these fathomless and foreign springs
that breathe their mists o’er ev’rything)

–and back they hiss in slyer tones,
to sleep and not to wish for home,
for home is but a distant Waking–
an upheaval of thund’rous shaking–
and lonesomeness, like starry skies,
is full to bursting with goodbyes.

Heady silence strangles thoughts
and twists my dreams all into knots
but when dawn breaks I shield my head
from the shattering of words unsaid–

(spiderwebs burdened with morning’s tears–
but mornings catch whispers and expose them as fears)

–and steel myself for the Waking hour
when silence holds a different power.

Mosaic world,
Thief of my temperance,
Drifting sorcerer of the windswept
Places of my heart,
Return your cobbled, lighted being
Once more to my side.
Fill again these intimate cracks,
The fingers unruly around glass bottles,
Grasping like a child
In that uncareful way
At the delicate truths which live,
Which die,
In the small spaces of a morning.

Gilded mystery,
Breathe anew the unlit stories
Of the thousand whispered words you have
So generously,
So cruelly,
Bequeathed me.

Am I so different from
Those wiser poets, eyes of stars,
Mouths agape in the moment of ecstasy,
When time breached through the cool water of night
Another sunsplit morning?
Have I not the same breathless spirit encountered,
When, happening to look up from weary life,
I have been struck by a momentary lapse of presence
And been transported back
Back
Through sublimity, to that moment when all things
All poets
Speak the same language?

Where do the wolves go
when their night feet have wandered
through dreams and through shadows,
spilled the milk of the moon into
pools of light on window sills?
Have they spoken their prayers,
their curses and sympathies
into the ears of wild children
before they are gone?
Whose wolf eyes water at
the coming of dawn;
some mournful sound lingering
to draw out the night
and to keep at bay the clamor of bells
the noise and the rustling of
so many human clothes?

I once had been known
to abandon my bed and I saw them,
their backs thin like shadows
or the air under snow,
and I think they have seen me
and recognized
for they have not returned–
my gaze must have caged them,
held them like sinners
beneath the bristling cold of their wiry moon.

Heat overtook the world
For a moment,
Bubbling its insistent movement into froth,
Jumping and excited,
Churning with the massive
sluggishness of magma,
Unapologetically leaving flames
Awoken momentarily into angry dancing
By a passing heat —
A scorched moment.

But then,
With the suddenness of nightfall,
The world cools
Briefly,
Water drifts into crystal shapes,
Time fractures,
White static hushes it all
Into the illusion of silence.

Peace on earth —
Snow on naked branches —
We must be silent
Before the world once more
remembers
The heat of its mouth.